Indian Railways beats Flipkart to emerge as the country's biggest online marketplace

Even as several e-commerce platforms are battling for supremacy, Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corp (IRCTC) has emerged as the country's biggest online marketplace. In the last financial year, IRCTC generated revenues of Rs 206 billion or $3 billion due to online sales.

This is nearly double the turnover of the country's biggest online retailer, Flipkart. This was an increase of 34% from the year before, when the company had posted profits of Rs 1.3 billion.

Though the IRTCTC website is known for its slow user interface, it has taken steps to upgrade it this year. In April this year, the government-owned portal had set a record of by taking 1.34 million ticket reservations in a single day.

“Bulk of the sales may be attributed to IRCTC’s rapid growth in e-ticketing which has been due to its interface and setting up of a very robust process," Sandip Dutta, IRCTC's public relations officer said. He added that the website's capacity had also been upgraded to book 7,200 tickets per minute as against 2,000 tickets per minute in the existing system.

IRCTC's profits in contrast to Indian e-commerce websites such as Flipkart and Snapdeal that are still running at losses. Two two Indian companies have been locked in a fierce three-way battle with Amazon India, to attract customers in India's growing online retail market.

Since it doesn't compete directly with these online marketplaces, IRCTC itself has tied up with Amazon India for two years as its preferred online shopping partner.

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